A Prosecutor Wanted to Spare Marcellus Williams’s Life. Missouri’s Attorney General Got in the Way.

A St. Louis County, Missouri, judge upheld the murder conviction of Marcellus Williams, ruling that a prosecutor who contaminated key evidence by handling it without wearing gloves before Williams’s trial had not acted in “bad faith,” but instead was merely following his normal procedure.

The ruling, issued on Thursday by Circuit Court Judge Bruce Hilton, dismantles Williams’s latest attempt to prove his innocence and paves the way for his execution on September 24. “There is no basis for a court to find that Williams is innocent,” Hilton wrote. “Williams is guilty of first-degree murder, and has been sentenced to death.”

The ruling comes three weeks after the judge had agreed to a deal between Williams and St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell’s office that would have spared Williams’s life. The agreement, which would have seen Williams sentenced to life in prison, was based on the recent discovery that prosecutors had failed to adequately preserve the murder weapon used to kill Felicia Anne Gayle Picus in 1998.

Lawyers representing Attorney General Andrew Bailey scoffed at the deal, arguing that Hilton didn’t have the right to resentence Williams. Bailey ran to the Missouri Supreme Court to stop the proceeding, which it did, ordering Hilton to hold an evidentiary hearing instead.

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During that hearing, on August 28, Bell and Williams’s attorneys maintained that the contamination of the murder weapon had violated Williams’s rights. Lawyers representing the attorney general meanwhile argued that handling evidence without protection was merely what the prosecutors did in St. Louis County at the time of Williams’s trial. Hilton has now agreed with that position.

In a statement following the ruling, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project and one of Williams’s attorneys, emphasized how rare and meaningful it was for Bell’s office to seek to vacate Williams’s conviction. “The decision of a prosecutor to move to vacate a murder conviction and death sentence is not done lightly,” she said, but Bell had done so because “there is overwhelming evidence that Marcellus Williams’s trial was unconstitutionally unfair, including revelations that the State contaminated the most critical evidence in the case — the murder weapon.”

A Deal Undone

Keith Larner, a retired former prosecutor who handled Williams’s case, was a key witness during the evidentiary hearing. He admitted that, before Williams’s trial, he had repeatedly handled the butcher knife used to kill Picus without wearing gloves that would have preserved any biological material on it linking her killer to the murder.

Larner testified that after the local crime lab failed to find any fingerprints on the weapon and had matched blood found on it to Picus, he felt free to handle the knife without taking precautions because the testing was complete. Larner also said he had already concluded that Picus’s killer had worn gloves. There is no concrete evidence in the case record that Picus’s killer wore gloves. Nonetheless, Larner insisted that there “was nothing to link anybody to the crime on that knife.” Larner recalled touching the knife at least five times prior to the trial without wearing protective gloves.

Williams maintains his innocence in the killing. No crime scene evidence linked him to the murder inside Picus’s home, and Williams long argued that testing of the weapon used to kill Picus could prove he was innocent. The trial judge denied his attorneys’ request to test the knife for DNA before trial, and he was convicted in 2001 based on the questionable testimony of two informants. DNA testing done in 2016, however, revealed unknown genetic material on the knife’s handle.

Based in part on the unidentified DNA, Bell filed a motion in January to vacate Williams’s conviction, invoking a relatively new Missouri law that allows elected prosecutors in the state to undo convictions they believe their offices wrongly obtained. The court was scheduled to hold an evidentiary hearing on the case, where a special-appointed counsel was slated to argue that Williams should be freed. Yet additional testing on the knife revealed at the last minute that neither Larner nor his investigator could be excluded as the source of the unknown DNA. In other words, whatever crime scene DNA might have been on the knife was irrevocably lost by the prosecution team’s handling of it before Williams’s trial.

Because of those findings, Bell admitted that the road to exonerate Williams would be steep. In mid-August, Bell struck a deal with Williams and his attorneys: The prosecutor would take the death penalty off the table if Williams would enter a so-called Alford plea that would allow him to maintain his innocence while conceding the state had enough to convict him. In exchange, Williams would be resentenced to life in prison. Picus’s husband, Dan Picus, had also approved the deal; he believes Williams is guilty, but told the court he does not want to see Williams executed.

Yet that wasn’t enough for the attorney general’s office, whose appeal to the state’s high court scuttled the agreement and prompted the court to schedule the evidentiary hearing the following week.

“There Is Still Time”

In his ruling on Thursday, Hilton concluded that because Larner’s actions weren’t intentional, under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, Williams’s rights had not been violated. The handling of the knife had been part of the prosecution’s normal practices, Hilton found. Larner, the judge wrote, had a “good faith basis and reasons for handling the knife without gloves.”

Hilton also rejected Williams and Bell’s other claims, including that Williams’s previous attorneys were ineffective in representing him at trial, and that Larner had struck people from the pool of potential jurors on Williams’s case because they were Black, which is unconstitutional. During the hearing, Jonathan Potts, who is working with Williams’s attorneys at the Midwest Innocence Project, pressed Larner about his stated decision to strike one potential juror because the man “looked very similar” to Williams. Larner said that what he meant was that they looked like “brothers,” he said. “Like familial brothers, not like Black people.”

During his short tenure as attorney general, Bailey has spent a considerable amount of time fighting efforts to exonerate the wrongly convicted. Still, as of Thursday afternoon, his office had not released a statement regarding Hilton’s ruling.

Rojo Bushnell, of the Midwest Innocence Project, said Williams’s legal team would continue to seek relief via the courts and Gov. Mike Parsons, who could grant clemency. “We will continue pursuing every possible option to prevent Mr. Williams’s wrongful execution,” she said in her statement. “There is still time … to ensure that Missouri does not commit the irreparable injustice of executing an innocent person.”

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